Commercial speech recognition systems that primarily use audio input are widely available, but often underutilized because of reliability concerns. Such conventional audio systems are adversely impacted by environmental noise, often requiring acoustically isolated rooms and consistent microphone positioning to reach even minimally acceptable error rates in common speech recognition tasks. The success of the currently available speech recognition systems is accordingly restricted to relatively controlled environments and well defined applications such as dictation or small to medium vocabulary voice-based control commands (hand free dialing, menu navigation, GUI screen control). These limitations have prevented the widespread acceptance of speech recognition systems in acoustically uncontrolled workplace or public sites.
In recent years, it has been shown that the use of visual information together with audio information significantly improve the performance of speech recognition in environments affected by acoustic noise. The use of visual features in conjunction with audio signals takes advantage of the bimodality of the speech (audio is correlated with lip position) and the fact that visual features are invariant to acoustic noise perturbation.
Various approaches to recovering and fusing audio and visual data in audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR) systems are known. One popular approach relies on mouth shape as a key visual data input. Unfortunately, accurate detection of lip contours is often very challenging in conditions of varying illumination or during facial rotations. Alternatively, computationally intensive approaches based on gray scale lip contours modeled through principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis, two-dimensional DCT, and maximum likelihood transform have been employed to recover suitable visual data for processing.
Fusing the recovered visual data with the audio data is similarly open to various approaches, including feature fusion, model fusion, or decision fusion. In feature fusion, the combined audiovisual feature vectors are obtained by concatenation of the audio and visual features, followed by a dimensionality reduction transform. The resultant observation sequences are then modeled using a hidden Markov model (HMM) technique. In model fusion systems, multistream HMM using assumed state synchronous audio and video sequences is used, although difficulties attributable to lag between visual and audio features can interfere with accurate speech recognition. Decision fusion is a computationally intensive fusion technique that independently models the audio and the visual signals using two HMMs, combining the likelihood of each observation sequence based on the reliability of each modality.